Recently I shared the quote: “Everyone talks about how hard it is to trust people after you’ve been hurt. But not many people talk about how hard it is to trust YOURSELF when you’ve had your gut instincts, values and convictions skilfully undermined in a relationship where you’ve been coercively controlled.” Up until I met my amazing fiancé Cam in 2020, I had a history of relationships where I’d been love bombed, gaslighted, manipulated, coercively controlled and emotionally, mentally…
Often I work with my coaching clients around situations that don’t serve them, and are making them completely miserable. 😞 They’ve usually been in the situation they’re in for a long period of time. The situation they’re in never starts how it ends. Take the example of an abusive relationship. If an abusive relationship began how it ends up, you’d never find yourself in that relationship. It starts with subtle things at first – put downs, comments about what…
#reflection I’m so grateful to myself. Grateful I worked so hard at working on building my sense of self worth, self love and self esteem after I let partners who didn’t deserve my love tear it to shreds. 💔 Grateful I kept building my self love when I met Cam because I felt panicky letting his amazing kind of love in. 🫣 I didn’t/couldn’t trust it at first. After a history of challenging relationships where I was let down…
When I coach my clients around relationship issues, I find a really good question to ask is whether they’d be happy if their kid (or sibling or someone else they love) was in a relationship similar to their own. 🧐 It’s a confronting question and one that generates an immediate response. We can fart-arse around any other question and smooth things over in our minds about our own relationship…. but if you took that same kind of…
I once overheard a female prisoner saying this to another prisoner and it’s stuck with me ever since. 😔 There are women out there who’ve been brainwashed, manipulated and controlled to the extent that they believe if their partner physically assaults them, they do it out of love. 💔 The cycle of trauma bonding is so real in this type of belief. WHAT IS TRAUMA BONDING? Contrary to what many believe, trauma bonding isn’t about bonding over shared…
I saw this quote on a very old little box in a very old, very grand lodge I stayed at in Scotland recently. 🏴 “A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke” is a line that appears in The Betrothed, a poem by Rudyard Kipling. In the poem, the speaker considers Maggie’s appearance and what she might be like at 50, and compares her to other women. He…